Recent Bookmarks 20-Apr-2009

Web-Scale Extraction of Structured Data (PDF)
Michael J. Cafarella, Jayant Madhavan, Alon Halevy. SIGMOD Record, December 2008.
“In this paper we describe three extraction systems that began with the goal of being domain and site independent, and therefore apply to the entire Web. … [O]ur experience has shown that significant value can [also] be obtained from analyzing collections of metadata on the Web. … We postulate that we can build from these artifacts a set of semantic services that are useful for many other tasks.”
Tags: web-of-data

Will the Internet Replace Universities?
Sean Carrol. Discover Magazine Blog. April 3, 2009.
gml: Sean Carrol disagrees with an article by Kevin Carey entitled What Colleges Should Learn from Newspapers’ Decline (Chronicle of Higher Education, 4/3/2009). Interesting set of more than 50 comments made by readers.
Tags: higher-education institutional-change

From Survival to Sustainability
Peter Stokes. Inside Higher Education. April 17, 2009.
“As a senior executive at one large, private university recently said to me, “We’re not persuaded that the business model or the economics of higher education are sustainable. We’re asking the question, ‘What if we were to start from scratch?’ ””
Tags: higher-education institutional-change